I want to begin with a number: 2,700 years.
That is how long ago, according to their own account, the ancestors of the Bnei Menashe left the land that is now Israel. They did not leave willingly. In approximately 722 BCE, the Assyrian king Sargon II conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel and deported its ten tribes into exile. They disappeared from recorded history almost immediately. For two and a half millennia, they existed only in prophecy, in longing, and in the unanswered question that has haunted Jewish tradition ever since: where did the ten tribes go?
Last week, 240 people from the hills of Manipur and Mizoram boarded a flight in northeastern India and landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. They walked down a red carpet in traditional attire, past a crowd of family members who had gone ahead of them over the previous three decades and were now cheering, weeping, and reaching out to touch them. Israel’s Minister of Aliyah and Integration Ofir Sofer was there to receive them.
“We are making history as we bring the entire Bnei Menashe community to Israel,” Sofer said. “There is no more fitting and moving time to welcome a plane full of olim than right after the state’s 78th Independence Day: welcome home.”
I am an Indian writer. I grew up knowing that India had Jewish communities: the Bene Israel of Maharashtra, the Cochin Jews of Kerala, and the Baghdadi Jews of Calcutta. That knowledge felt distant but real, a comfortable civilizational footnote. I did not know, until I began researching this story, that there was a fourth community, or rather, a fourth possibility, living not in the cosmopolitan cities of western India but in the forested, hilly, conflict-riven northeast, in two states that most Indians associate with insurgency and ethnic tension rather than ancient Israelite exile.
The Bnei Menashe changed that for me. And this week, they changed it for the world.
2,722 Years of Memory, Carried Without Paper
The Ten Lost Tribes disappeared from historical records after the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel around 722 BCE, giving rise to enduring speculation about their fate. The Bnei Menashe, which means “Children of Manasseh” in Hebrew, believe they are descended from the tribe of Manasseh, the largest of the lost ten.
Their account of how they got from Assyria to northeastern India is extraordinary. According to their oral history, after being exiled from the Kingdom of Israel, some members of these tribes migrated over centuries through regions including Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet, and China, while continuing to observe certain Jewish customs such as circumcision. They eventually settled around 400 years ago in the present-day northeastern Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur.
They had no Torah scrolls. They had no synagogues. They had no rabbis. They had no written records of any kind, which is part of why their claim remains contested. According to their narrative, they retained their own customs but endured persecution by the Chinese, who killed their priests and burned their holy books, which explains why they do not possess any Scroll of the Law or texts in Hebrew.
What they did have were practices. Throughout their wandering in the diaspora, the Bnei Menashe observed the Sabbath, practiced circumcision on the eighth day, kept the laws of Kashrut, and meticulously upheld the rules of family purity. They even established cities of refuge, where people who had killed inadvertently could flee, just as the Torah prescribes.
When British missionaries arrived in the 19th century bearing Christian Bibles, something unexpected happened. Many Bnei Menashe initially believed the ancient prophecy of the white man returning their holy book had been fulfilled. Drawn by the shared Old Testament stories, they embraced Christianity in large numbers. However, the missionaries demanded they abandon their ancestral Jewish-like customs, labeling them pagan. This suppression culminated in mass conversion, but a segment of the community continued to observe their traditions in secret.
Then, in 1951, in a village in Mizoram, a man had a dream.
The Dream That Started Everything
In 1951, a Pentecostal church deacon named Challianthanga, also known as Mela Chala, in the village of Buallawn in Mizoram, reported a vision in which God instructed him that his people’s pre-Christian religion was in fact ancient Judaism and that they were descendants of the lost Israelites who should return to their original homeland.
In 1979, Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail made contact with the community, and in the subsequent years, several young men were brought to Jerusalem to study Judaism. Between 1989 and 2003, Rabbi Avichail facilitated the migration of around 850 members to Israel.
The movement accelerated in 2005, when on March 30, 2005, Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar formally recognized the Bnei Menashe as descendants of the tribe of Manasseh, calling them zera Yisrael, “seed of Israel.” This required formal Orthodox conversion for full recognition but was a long-awaited affirmation.
From 2004 onwards, the organization Shavei Israel, led by Michael Freund, took charge of aliyah efforts, establishing Hebrew centers in Manipur and Mizoram to train candidates for conversion.
The road was not straight. Governments changed, policies stalled, bureaucratic barriers multiplied. There were freezes, resumptions, emergency airlifts, and long silences. Individual families were split across two countries for years at a time, one half in Aizawl or Imphal, the other half in Kiryat Shmona or Afula, connected by phone calls and prayer. As of December 2023, 5,000 Bnei Menashe had immigrated to Israel. Another 6,000 remained in India, waiting.
That waiting ended in November 2025.
Operation Wings of Dawn
In November 2025, the Israeli government launched Operation Wings of Dawn to facilitate the immigration of the remaining members of the community. The program is estimated to cost around $30 million and includes flights, conversion classes, housing, Hebrew lessons, and other benefits.
The Hebrew name for the operation is “Kanfei Shahar,” Wings of Dawn, taken from Psalm 139: “If I take the wings of the dawn and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand will lead me.” It is a verse about the impossibility of being lost from God’s presence. For a community that spent 2,700 years in the uttermost parts of the earth, it is a verse that must carry an almost unbearable weight.
The operation envisions the relocation of 1,200 Bnei Menashe members currently living in Mizoram and Manipur by the end of 2026, with an additional 4,800 to follow by 2030. The operation is led by the Ministry of Aliyah and Absorption and the Jewish Agency and is carried out together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Conversion Authority, the Population and Immigration Authority, and other partners.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu views the initiative as “an important and Zionist decision that will also strengthen the North and Galilee” regions of Israel.
“This is the fulfillment of a dream that began 2,700 years ago when the ten tribes were cast into exile, and incredibly enough, we are now witnesses to the beginning of their return,” said Shavei Israel founder Michael Freund. “This is a remarkable story of Zionism, and it underlines the importance of the State of Israel as a place where even Jews who have been cut off from the rest of our people can find their way back.”
The Questions This Story Raises
I want to be honest about the complexity here, because this story deserves it.
The DNA question is unresolved. DNA tests conducted on several hundred male members of the community did not find clear evidence of Middle Eastern ancestry. A study conducted in 2005 found some signs of maternal ancestry linked to the Near East, although the researchers suggested these results may reflect thousands of years of intermarriage between populations from the Near East and surrounding regions.
There is also a geopolitical dimension that deserves acknowledgment. There is speculation about a connection between the operation and Israel’s broader policy of strengthening Jewish presence in strategic regions. Netanyahu’s government has announced 34 new settlements in the West Bank, and some have noted that the use of Jewish immigration as a demographic lever has always justified the increase in settlements in areas considered strategic. The Bnei Menashe are being settled primarily in northern Israel, in the Galilee, not in the West Bank. But the political logic around aliyah and demographics is never entirely separate from the settlements’ question.
Taken together, the Bnei Menashe story represents one of the most dramatic religious transformations in modern history: in less than a century, the community transitioned from Animism to Christianity and then to Judaism. That transition was not without its contradictions. A community that once had its traditions suppressed by missionaries now practices a religion that itself requires formal conversion for admission. The irony is not lost on observers.
And yet, and this is what I keep returning to, sitting in Madhya Pradesh, far from the hills of Manipur and even farther from the Galilee, none of these complexities quite diminish what actually happened at Ben-Gurion Airport last week.
What I Think About When I Think About This
India is a country that has kept its Jews safe for over two thousand years. The Bene Israel arrived on the Konkan coast and were absorbed. The Cochin Jews built a synagogue next to a Hindu king’s palace. The Baghdadi Jews built Bombay’s libraries and docks. And in the hills of Manipur and Mizoram, a community that may or may not be genetically descended from ancient Israel spent generations preserving practices that looked, from the outside, like Judaism, without a Torah, without a rabbi, without a word of Hebrew.
Whether the Bnei Menashe are the literal descendants of the tribe of Manasseh is a question that archaeologists, geneticists, and rabbis will continue to debate. I am not qualified to settle it and I will not pretend otherwise.
But I do know what it looks like when people carry something across 2,700 years without dropping it. And I know what it looks like when a state decides that those people deserve to come home, regardless of what the DNA tests say, because the sincerity of their longing is beyond reasonable dispute.
The wings of the dawn carried 240 people from the hills of northeastern India to Tel Aviv last week. Several thousand more are waiting their turn.
India let them go, as it has always let its Jewish communities go, without rancor. Israel brought them in, as it always has, with ceremony and tears on a red carpet.
Somewhere in that exchange, across 2,700 years of wandering and memory, something that was lost has been, at least partly, found.